The term “Social Selling” has always been a puzzlement to me. Why? Because “Social Selling” is what selling ALWAYS WAS AND IS!?

The best sales people for the past few centuries have known that in order to sell, you need to build a brand, build a rapport, become a trusted quantity, and all of those things that somehow have become some sort of magic revelation in “social selling”.

Hiring salespeople and sales leaders is one of the toughest challenges for any start-up – actually – for ANY company. It is very easy for a sales person to look good on paper – and especially for a salesperson to do a great job in an interview. After all, we are people trained to manipulate conversations and to make things sound great! Recently, I was working with a company who had the opportunity to hire an amazing sales leader that they knew could perform, and against my urging decided to roll the dice and find someone over the internet.

Last week, out of the blue, I got a message from a woman who wanted to meet with me to discuss some potential business partnerships with QuotaCrush. But this story actually starts much earlier.

Ten years ago, I was running the Northeast for a mobile marketing firm, and she was planning the mobile strategy for a Fortune 100 financial services firm. By being persistent, I was able to secure a meeting with her, and pitch my company’s product. I had several meetings with her over the next several weeks, and I was consistent and persistent. At the end of the day, she did not buy the product. It was not a perfect match for what they wanted, so we connected on LinkedIn and we went our separate ways.

Several years ago I joined an internet company as a sales rep, and in about 3 months, I became the top salesperson. At the national sales meeting, one of the other reps came up to me and asked how I was having so much success. I responded, “I’m honestly not that sure that I’m ding anything revolutionary. It just seems that these people are happy to take my call and after explaining the product and how it solves their problems, they are willing to buy.” He stared at me blankly for about a minute and then said, “…You call them?”

The easiest thing to do in a sales call is to just talk and talk and talk. Yet – this rarely leads to a sale. When you are more focused on getting all of your points out, and less on what the customer wants to hear – you are essentially losing lots of opportunities to learn what the customer needs – and responding to that need.

I recently was a featured speaker at a SalesHacker event at Projective Space in New York City, and while I spoke about many topics from my book, I spoke for the first time about the topic of sales land mines and it seemed to generate quite a bit of questions both at the event and afterwards, and I realized that while I teach this method a lot, I have never written about it.

To be clear, I do not mean to make light of all of the tragedy in the world relative to land mines, but it is a term that describes a particular sales tactic well.

But, if I ever send a blast email, it is clear that it is a blast email. I personally subscribe to the notion that you should be doing your homework and researching companies to make sure that you are responding in a way that matters to the prospects. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be spending so much time on FunnelFire.

I know that I’ve been very lax on new posts here – but its been for good reason. First, because I’ve been hard at work at FunnelFire – which is moving along very well. Second, because I’ve been putting all my writing effort into finishing my startup sales book. It’s taken a while (I do not recommend trying to write a book AND launch a start-up simultaneously).